Pages

2012-11-15

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started. Finally, for some reason Blogger decided to delete the content of what I had here, so everything up until "Day 2" is very much paraphrased from memory.

Day 0

I tried the live session again using a live USB made with MultiSystem. It worked fine as usual.

Day 1

Installation went well. I really like the way that openSUSE smartly suggests partition layouts, though it could use a little more explanation regarding the partition labels and layout for newbies. The installation took about 5 minutes in all. After the zeroth reboot came some final installation configuration, followed by the desktop, which I quickly customized as usual.

The desktop works well on the whole. Occasionally a weird error message of no particular consequence would pop up. Also, possibly due to using the home partition from a previous installation, the YaST2 GUI package manager and updater would not work as it would complain about PackageKit (which is not present in openSUSE as far as I know) being open at the same time, so I had to use Zypper in the CLI to do package installation and updates. Otherwise, my UROP work went fine.

Day 2

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 3

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 4

My UROP work went as normal. I also upgraded the installed packages using "sudo zypper update" and installed KolourPaint using "sudo zypper install kolourpaint".

Day 5

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 6

My UROP work was hampered by Okular continually crashing. I had to install Evince instead, which surprisingly did not look ugly like most GNOME/GTK+ applications in KDE but instead was themed like a stock GNOME application with KDE titlebars. That worked fine.

Day 7

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 8

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either, though shutting down did not happen for some reason, so I had to hold down the power button to make it happen.

Day 9

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 10

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 11

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either, though shutting down did not happen for some reason, so I had to hold down the power button to make it happen.

Day 12

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 13

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 14

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 15

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 16

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 17

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 18

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 19

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either.

Day 20

My UROP work went as normal. There were no surprises today either. I also applied a final round of updates; that occurred without any issues.

Conclusion

I didn't have much time to really edit this, so this will of course seem a bit bland and repetitive. The main points to take away were that Okular was unreliable (though not totally unworkable), that I needed to use the CLI package manager as the GUI package manager refused to work, and that sometimes the shutdown process wouldn't finish correctly; otherwise, things worked fine. Given that Kubuntu and Linux Mint with KDE worked just as well in general and also did not have the above issues, I can't really see why I would recommend openSUSE over those two distributions. I am not posting a picture because it's the same KDE setup as usual that I prefer.

You may notice that it has been a while since I have posted anything substantial and/or Linux-related. To be honest, I'm quite happy with Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce on my laptop, and the novelty of reviewing various distributions has worn off somewhat. Oh, sure, I'm probably going to review Elementary OS and SolusOS when the new versions of those distributions come out, though those won't be for a while. I will probably also review Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" when that is officially released, which should be sooner rather than later. But I feel like I've reviewed most of the distributions that I ever want to review at least once, so unless there is some groundbreaking new development in a distribution that I like, most of the changes I will see are incremental, and I don't feel like I have the time or interest to catalog those changes anymore. Maybe during IAP or summer, I will renew my interest in reviewing distributions on a regular basis. But until then, although this blog is certainly not history, I think it is fairly safe to say that it will be updated once every now and again with random thoughts on something or the other (as it has been for the last couple of months) as opposed to regular posts on something like Linux distribution reviews.

9 comments:

Regarding this: the YaST2 GUI package manager and updater would not work as it would complain about PackageKit... OpenSUSE uses PackageKit, because of the KDE appstore application(called Apper). This constantly looks for updates and intervenes with Yast (very annoying). The solution is simple: remove Apper as soon as possible after every OpenSUSE install.

Personally, I never encountered the problems with Okular you described.

long time ago , last time i tried a Desktop linux, i did some simple test, using kde. I Opened a remote SMB share and play a 100 Mb avi. What i had : the system told me it was coping the entire file in /tmp and after that it was going to open it. It did 'not work and copy the entire file in the local system is quite a silly thing. Working on a big company it happen many times a day to open file in remote SMB shares ( linux , Netapp , readyNAs and others. ) If this thing will not be fixed linux on the desktop of a big company can't go much further IMHO. Stefano . Italy.

You can remove Apper, but what I've done (with both openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2) is to simply stop Apper Monitor from starting up (Main Menu > Favorites > Configure Desktop > System Administration > Startup and Shutdown > Service Manager -> uncheck the box next to "Apper Monitor"). Then, I think you'll need to restart the session. After doing that, I have had no problems simply using YaST Online Update

Also, I read this comment at DistroWatch -- if you don't remove or disable Apper, you may want to check to see if this solves the problem: "The package kit problem can be solved by editing the list of sources. The DVD is left enabled and package kit keeps looking for it."

Besides that issue, openSUSE 12.2 looks very good after a couple of months on two different computers.

for opensuse 12.2 these are the steps: after first installation open monitor and kill packagekit. then open yast -> upgrade software. When u finish the big update reboot. Now u need to open yast--> manage repositories and disable the (now) unuseful dvd or usbpen source.Apper will play normally and enought well